Pinboard - antisocial bookmarking - <AUTHOR> http://www.pinboard.in

<comment><USER2> Hey, that's neat. Maciej Ceglowski and Joshua Schachter (founder of del.icio.us) are good friends. I recall what must have been five years ago when they would hang out on Freenode arguing how to design various projects like LOAF (<http://loaf.cantbedone.org/about.htm#authors>) and I'm sure del.icio.us. It'd be amazing to see some of that energy again in practice. My best wishes to this project.

<comment><USER3> I chime in from time to time but I'm not working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The payment scheme is what interests me most. I can't even try it out and I'm seriously considering paying this guy a couple of dollars.

This is highly irrational behavior on my part considering there are dozens of free "social bookmarking" sites out there that certainly accomplish my very limited social bookmarking goals.

It reminds me of old carnival shows (or any nightclub with a line outside). Pay money to get inside. No preview up front. You're paying for exclusivity, mystery, and reputation instead of features.

Additionally, people who pay money for something often feel the need to justify the purchase to themselves and others. This will generally increase their happiness with the product and irrationally cause them to stick with the product through technical difficulties and feature shortages (humans are terrible at evaluating sunk costs). And because they have emotionally and financially invested in the company, there's a larger chance they will recommend this website to their friends, thus creating higher switching costs for themselves.

I'm interested to see how this pricing experiment turns out.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Nightly database backups to S3 (welcome, Ma.gnolia users!)_

Too soon, guys.

<comment><USER6> Also, I believe Magnolia did do daily backups. They just weren't that good at it.

<comment><USER7> From what I can tell from watching Larry Halff's strange video interview on the Magnolia failure, they backed up a live, half-terabyte(!) database over firewire using rsync. That is, they copied the actual table data files while they were in use.

Pinboard uses good old-fashioned mysqldump instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's not anti-social bookmarking. This is anti-social bookmarking: <http://sm.purepistos.net/about>

I went from browser bookmarks, to Delicious, to exploring (Magnolia, Simpy, etc.), to Diigo, to Selfmarks. A couple hundred bookmarks later, I haven't looked back; it's all I need.

Functional, usable demo at <http://sm-demo.purepistos.net/> .

</comment><comment><USER9> Who can resist rooting for software that declines to label itself in the old- fashioned "alpha" / "beta" way... and instead states clearly in the footer:

"©2009 Nine Fives Software. Pinboard is full of bugs but daily trying...

Too bad it's not going to get much test-driving: "Pinboard is free to use, but charges a small, one-time membership fee."

<comment><AUTHOR> I was mostly intrigued by the payment model. As more users sign up, accounts cost more.

<comment><USER9> Ah, I didn't get that far - and was editing my comment before you posted.

Yes, an interesting (first-of-a-kind?) incentive to "sign up early." Wonder if _any_ will sign up with so many free options around?

<comment><USER10> According to the website, the fee is (number of users * 0.001). Since the current fee is $2.91, the number of people who've signed up is around 2,910. Seems like at least a few people willing to throw in a few bucks to give it a shot. It'll be interesting to see what will happen to growth as the rate goes up and up.

<comment><USER11> How much they've made so far, with scala:

      scala> def income(n_users:Int) = (1 to n_users) map(i => (i-1)*.001) reduceLeft(_+_)
     income: (Int)Double

      scala> income(2901)
     res0: Double = 4206.45

<comment><USER12> You need to round the intermediate values down like they seem to be doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the roadmap: "Get acquired by Yahoo and slowly grow useless" -- lol! :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Hmmm... Only providing one password field seems like a road down which madness lies, even if it's unmasked as here.

We had an app where we'd ask for e-mail addresses. A lot of people mistyped their e-mail address, which was of course unmasked. As much as half of the non-activated accounts were do to a typo in the e-mail address. We now ask for the e-mail address twice, it made activation failures a lot less likely.

<comment><USER15> Thought experiment: How many people never sign up at all because you ask for email and password twice each?

Did you track how many fewer signups you get now that you have that double email? Are you net positive on the total activated users per day, adjusted for growth?

<comment><USER14> I have never aborted signing up because the form asked for the same information twice. Nor can I imagine doing so if it was obviously intended.

I could've done A/B testing and I could've done a full statistical analysis of the results. But I don't think splitting hairs like that is particularly useful. I simply had no reason to believe that it would affect our growth negatively, nor do I have such reason now. We are growing very, very fast.

But what I was really referring to was the customer service overhead. Almost every account that had a failed e-mail address would cause us some customer service. People creating another account which needed approval to prevent multiple accounts per user (which is cheating the game), or just asking questions. I cannot imagine people asking less questions if they paid for an account and can't access it.

<comment><USER15> I only mention it because users actually do behave strangely this way. Every field you show them loses a percentage of them. It's weird.

Here's an experience I had a couple years ago where a small tweak to remove a signup barrier more than doubled the number of people signing up:

[http://twiddla.blogspot.com/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day- one....](http://twiddla.blogspot.com/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-one.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A screenshot at least would be nice.

<comment><USER17> <http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/649/pinboard.png>

<comment><USER18> is starring used for super important bookmarks?

<comment><USER7> Starring is used to select bookmarks for bulk operations (add tag/make private/mark as unread etc.)

<comment><USER19> Hm, wouldn't plain checkboxes suffice? That's a pretty entrenched convention. Not to mention that using stars in that way doesn't really mesh with that convention either. Is there some aspect of it I'm missing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What about Google bookmarks? They are also private, you can export them and I suspect are backed up.

</comment><comment><USER21> What about using Firefox's bookmarks sinced by Weave? Its private, its safe, it supports tags, it is easy acces the bookmarks through the awesome bar, etc.

<comment><USER22> I'm using Weave (just for bookmarks), and couldn't be happier. On any given day I might use a Windows PC at work, my Macbook Pro at work or at home, my wife's Windows laptop at home, or my main desktop at home which dual boots Vista and Leopard. Weave just works, and I have all my bookmarks synced on all of these computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 7 hours ag it was $2.91, and about an hour ago it was $3.93? Not too bad. Would be cool if I could sell my username to someone when it's a hundred-odd bucks :D

Had a teensy bit o' cash to splurge, and signed up. Very clean look - Delicious-ish without the 'sociality'. Loved it so much I deleted my Delicious account (and now hoping Maciej doesn't pull a Zune Store!)

Also hoping last item in the roadmap's After That section comes kinda true, and Yahoo! is nice enough to refund at the same going rate (i.e. users * 0.001)

p.s: First time I've EVER paid for an online service, piddling amount though it may be..

<comment><USER7> Thanks a lot! My hope is actually to operate the site as a going concern (with a paid version offering additional features). We saw what happened last time someone sold one of these bookmarking sites to a big company...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> PSA: Pinboard's account activation emails are flagged as spam by Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER25> Thanks guys. Exactly what I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER26> their sign up form doesn't mask passwords

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Oops - replied to wrong thread :(</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for an older post - Predictions - <AUTHOR>

There was a post on Hacker News some weeks ago about a company/org that had done an amazing job of making predictions.  They were reviewing their (mostly tech?) predictions in the article.<p>I've searched in multiple places, but can't turn up the post or the article. <comment><USER2> Ray Kurzweil's predictions?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2036575>

[http://c0068172.cdn2.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/predictio...](http://c0068172.cdn2.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/predictions.pdf)</comment>


Show HN: arkOS - Securely self-hosting your data - <AUTHOR> https://ark-os.org <comment><AUTHOR> I've been quietly working on this project for awhile now, but with all of the news about NSA in recent days, I thought it important to share a little about my project.

I am working on a platform called arkOS. arkOS is an operating system that is initially designed to run on the Raspberry Pi, and will eventually be expanded to other architectures. It comes with a built-in graphical server management system called Genesis, which will allow users to _easily_ and _securely_ host websites, webapps (Wordpress/Drupal), email accounts, cloud services like ownCloud, Dropbox clones and anything else. The coolest part of Genesis is that it uses a plugin interface, so anyone who has a new project that they want to manage only needs to whip up a quick script in Python and it can be easily integrated into the rest of the application. Genesis was initially a fork of another server management app called Ajenti, but now extends its features and takes it in a more comprehensive direction.

arkOS is similar to two other projects that have been in the spotlight lately - FreedomBox and Space Monkey. It differs from FreedomBox because it is not focused on redoing existing networking systems. It is simply dedicated to hosting your data and does not try to reinvent the wheel. It also puts a premium on user experience - it is designed to require as little command-line work as possible in order to maintain it (ideally zero). It differs from Space Monkey because it allows you to actually _serve_ the content you put onto it, rather than just serving as a media storage system. While both of these tools are very exciting and important steps to "liberating" the cloud, I believe that arkOS fills an important niche in between the two.

EDIT: Regarding how it can prevent against gov't/corporate spying like with PRISM: The idea is that it would provide an easy alternative to the services that are provided by these large companies, i.e. Google Talk (or whatever they call it nowadays) replaced with an XMPP server, Gmail replaced with self- hosted email, Dropbox replaced by your own self-hosted instance of ownCloud, etc. The only part of PRISM that it might not provide a defence against would be big social networks (Facebook et al), but you would still be able to host your own StatusNet instance or Tent server on your arkOS server and have alternatives that way. When services can be decentralized and brought back under individual user control, a "direct link" into major web company's servers is definitely made irrelevant.

If anyone is interested in this project or would like to stay apprised on its status, I encourage you to check out the links below. I have many more things in the works for arkOS, including a system that helps people get around port blocking and dynamic DNS issues, something that prevents a large number of people from self-hosting their data.

Thanks for reading :)

\--

Free The Cloud: [https://ark-os.org/cloud](https://ark-os.org/cloud)

Project Website: [https://ark-os.org](https://ark-os.org)

Github repo for Genesis, the server management GUI: [https://github.com/cznweb/genesis](https://github.com/cznweb/genesis)

<comment><USER2> Looks nice and I like the whole privacy-focused ideology, however isn't this just an operating system with a control panel that easily allows you to install programs using a graphical interface vs. the command line? You know, like webmin/virtualmin, cpanel, etc.?

I suppose it makes a lot more sense to install a os + control panel on a device such as the rpi than a webserver (like using XBMC on a HTPC), so your project may have a future :)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> It is an operating system with a control panel, but the control panel is/will be a lot more comprehensive than Webmin or analogous server management apps. Whereas Webmin gives you a web interface with which to manage your server, if you don't understand how Apache/nginx/etc work then you still won't be able to add your own website, for example. If you have no idea about mail relays, virtual domains and so on, you probably will be way over your head if you try to host your own email. Genesis grinds the learning curve down as much as possible, by allowing websites (or other plugins like email/XMPP and so on) to be added with wizards and non-complicated language. Closer to Zentyal's web administration systems than that of Webmin. But it still represents a big improvement over how Zentyal works when we are just talking about personal use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Excellent project! We need to pull together and fund this so jcook818 can work on it full time. jcook818, how can we contribute? Have you thought about setting this up on Kickstarter or the like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there -- I do have plans for a Kickstarter, with some very interesting ideas on things that will be offered. Won't get into too much detail, but it will be awesome I can assure you :) I need to find a helper / partner before I can get to that stage though. Check my comment above for details.

If you are interested in donating NOW which really helps server fees and other overhead, you are certainly welcome to do so and it is much appreciated. [https://ark-os.org/donate](https://ark-os.org/donate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jacob , It's great that you're working on this.

But isn't the biggest problem with security/privacy is that people don't care about it and don't use privacy enhancing products?

Because if that's the case, the starting point should be a viable marketing strategy - which will define the product.

Snapchat is is a good example of this. They wrap a viable user need with a privacy preserving idea with great marketing. Have a look at their site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there! Yes, I agree that apathy is a big problem. My hypothesis is that apathy can be driven down once the investment in time/money/education required for self-hosting services is reduced. If it can't be, then more educational campaigns are needed. I'm not really a marketing-type of person, but I would love to have someone on the project that can do this sort of thing, and be more of a conduit for the community. I only have two hands on the project at this point, but hopefully in the future that will change :)

<comment><USER4> There are secure services for IM/VOIP and maybe email(npt sure how secure) and of course TOR. Some are very easy to use like Redphone/textSecure which integrate transparently with android calls/meessaging.

As far i can understand, they didn't grab much popularity. So i'm not sure ease of alone is enough.

I'm not really a marketing person too, just interested in it, so i don't think i could help much.

Anyway, best of luck with the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It does not really resolve problem for the fully paranoid. Instead (and in addition to) of service providers the backdoors could be installed to your software, Raspberry Pi, or even to silicon. There is small number of providers of any of these, so they are quite easy to be controlled by interested parties. Solution: publish designs, so everyone will write your own software, build your own hardware.

</comment><comment><USER6> "arkOS is designed for use on the Raspberry Pi"

What about this is specific to the Raspberry Pi, and why? Can Genesis run on any Arch Linux installation?

<comment><AUTHOR> The operating system that Genesis runs on is packaged for installation on the Raspberry Pi, and its software packages are compiled for armv6 at this time. That being said, you can run Genesis on Arch Linux with little difficulty by just cloning the Github repo.

arkOS is designed for use on the RPi at this time, because my goal is to create the best user experience possible at the lowest possible entry price. Lowering the barriers to self-host one's data and all that. Once Genesis is closer to its 1.0 release (and hopefully once I have more volunteers to help out), arkOS will be extended to more powerful platforms like the Beagleboard Black (armv7) and ultimately x64/64 systems. Since I'm only one person at the moment, I thought it prudent to start with a small focus then expand from there.

<comment><USER7> Plus, you can sell pre-installed microSD cards for $10, which should bring some revenue to help the project along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find my Raspberry Pi and install this OS, feel cool. But I think I will keep my ownCloud staffs, because I have two PCs and one Mac running three different systems... If arkOS could support Mac and Win, I will have a try again. BTW, the ownCloud really always delete my files when sync, which make me always want to go back to Dropbox...

</comment><comment><USER9> doesn't this just solve a piece of the mess? it is the communications channels being monitored, so email, chats, voip, whatever messages would still be easily tapped into.

they control the pipes, the endpoints do not matter much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Notwithstanding a MITM attack, the pipes are secure enough, provided you are properly using encryption. If an app stores _any_ sort of data unencrypted on a centralized server, that data is potentially accessible to others who can compromise that server. This makes endpoints a piece of critical importance. When you self-host your data, you can patch that hole in the armour so to speak, because the endpoint falls under your control. Coupled with encryption, it's a massive deterrent to eavesdropping.

In brief: it doesn't solve every Internet eavesdropping problem known to man, no. But it solves a very substantial one that hasn't really been tackled to date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know of anything similar to arkOS that I could throw on a netbook? I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu and building it out myself, but if there's a pre-made distro that would be helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that I'm aware of, sorry. Zentyal is an option, but I believe it is geared towards small business, and is probably closer to Webmin than arkOS/Genesis.

I do have plans of making arkOS work on x86-based systems, but my first goal is armv6 and armv7 (RPI, Beagleboard Black, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Chrome is giving me a Invalid Server Certificate error on the site(I had to edit the https to http ).

This would definitely be a good way to use my ownCloud :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? That's weird, it works just fine for me...

<comment><USER12> I'm getting the same thing with Konqueror

edit: same thing = same problem

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This defends against the Dropbox part of PRISM, but hardly the rest of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that it would provide an easy alternative to the services that are provided by these large companies, i.e. Google Talk (or whatever they call it nowadays) replaced with an XMPP server, Gmail replaced with self-hosted email, Dropbox replaced by your own self-hosted instance of ownCloud, etc. The only part of PRISM that it might not provide a defence against would be big social networks (Facebook et al), but you would still be able to host your own StatusNet instance or Tent server on your arkOS server and have alternatives that way. When services can be decentralized and brought back under individual user control, a "direct link" into major web company's servers is definitely made irrelevant.

<comment><USER13> Self-hosted e-mail still has to get to its recipients. Most of us can't have a "I won't e-mail anyone not on my own e-mail server" policy. Same for XMPP - sure, internal traffic is safe, but as soon as you're contacting someone outside your network it's entirely possible they're being watched by PRISM.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true. I didn't mean to say that it would completely negate the effects of PRISM (or similar programs/policies). And it obviously doesn't eliminate the need for using encryption when you communicate with external services. But it will still "defend" against it by allowing people to repatriate a substantial amount of their data. The less personally identifiable data for you that Google/Microsoft/et al have on their servers, the more that policies like these become irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Your server's down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh, wonderful timing. Thanks for letting me know

Edit: Fixed, for now

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> what license is this released under?

<comment><AUTHOR> The management interface (Genesis) is GPLv3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any of the personal cloud solutions like Tonido or your own NAS will help as well.</comment>


HTML5 game with random dungeons - <AUTHOR> http://757697685.r.cdn77.net/index.html?hackernews=13

<comment><USER2> You've posted this link a few times now. Maybe you'd get a better response if you posted more info instead of dumping people onto the login page?

Maybe some blog posts about the server infrastructure, overall design or creating random content? Those are some things I'd like to read about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm not a big writer though but maybe one day I will take myself together and write at least 1 blog post about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> ...which comes up as a phishing site in Chrome????

<comment><AUTHOR> thats weird, doesnt happen on my chrome is it happening on [http://rpg.mo.ee](http://rpg.mo.ee) as well?</comment></comment>


Apple "Back to the Mac" Event Oct. 20: New OS X - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5662920/apple-back-to-the-mac-event-october-20th

<comment><USER2> And so it begins...</comment>


NodeUp: New Node.js Podcast - <AUTHOR> http://nodeup.com/2 James Halliday, Isaac Schlueter and Mikeal Rogers: New Node Logo, Browserify Plugins, Node on Windows, NPM on Windows, HTTP Client Rewrite, Node Knockout, and NodeConf SummerCamp <comment><AUTHOR> James Halliday, Isaac Schlueter and Mikeal Rogers on New Node Logo, Browserify Plugins, Node on Windows, NPM on Windows, HTTP Client Rewrite, Node Knockout, and NodeConf SummerCamp

<comment><USER2> The first thing I thought about when I saw the page was "New Node Logo". Turtle with a rocket-ship on the back is about a trillion times cooler than that hexagonal thing that they've gone with. (at least it's _my_ personal preference).

Oh well. I can live with a crappy logo, but have no desire to wear it on a t-shirt.

<comment><USER3> Whenever I hear logo and turtle I think of Logo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The MP3 stream is taking forever to load.</comment>


Activists seize control of Seattle neighborhood, declare "autonomous zone." - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/antifa-seattle-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone <comment><USER2> _" On the new rebel state's first night, the atmosphere was festive and triumphant. Hooded men spray-painted the police station with slogans and anarchist symbols, renaming it the "Seattle People's Department East Precinct." Raz Simone, a local rapper with an AK-47 slung from his shoulder and a pistol attached to his hip, screamed, "This is war!" into a white-and- red megaphone and instructed armed paramilitaries to guard the barricades in shifts. Later in the night, Simone was filmed allegedly assaulting multiple protestors who disobeyed his orders, informing them that he was the "police" now, sparking fears that he was becoming the de facto warlord of the autonomous zone. A homeless man with a baseball bat wandered along the borderline and two unofficial medics in medieval-style chain mail stood ready for action."_

This sounds like the real world version of a Shadowrun game lol. Honestly the city's response was probably appropriate, let them LARP for a while until they run out of bottled water or whatever.

<comment><USER3> Maybe if they LARP hard enough, the PNW will get their own version of Freetown Christiania [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's quite an uh, emotive take. IMO this article gives a more informational view of the situation: [https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests- for-racia...](https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial- justice/2020/06/11/874690470/go-back-to-your-bunker-seattle-mayor-tells-trump- in-spat-over-protests)

</comment><comment><USER5> A friend lives in Seattle and texted me today about his visit last night:

> I was there last night and it's such a cool pseudo utopian place

> The media coverage of it is WILD

> People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards and > people are dying of hunger and instead its...like a music festival > campground

> There are speakers, musicians, art walls. I took a group pic for a bunch of > black guys last night and they were so proud of what was built because they > felt like they fought for it, which in a sense, they did.

<comment><USER6> I was also there last night and agree with your friend. I didn't personally see anyone with a gun, no one asked me for ID, and no one tried to charge me an entrance fee. The vibe is a cross between a summer block-party and a music festival: lots of street art, music, barbecues, canvassers collecting signatures for petitions, people planting a community garden. I saw several people I know from around the neighborhood who, if they have secret connections to Antifa, have done a remarkable job of hiding them.

The disparity between my firsthand experience and the way that this is reported in the media has been eye-opening.

<comment><USER7> > The disparity between my firsthand experience and the way that this is > reported in the media has been eye-opening.

I haven't read much about this zone, but I don't think I'd trust "City Journal" to describe it accurately. The HTML title of their front page is:

> City Journal | Urban Affairs Magazine | Conservative Magazine Online

Their front page is full of articles pushing back against the current protest movement, from pretty much every angle possible:

> Racism Is An Empty Thesis

> False Prophets: If you really want to help black America, don't look to > Black Lives Matter.

> Repudiate the Anti-Police Narrative

> The Cost of Bad Intentions: Progressive policies threaten a new era of urban > dysfunction.

> Why We Need the Police

> Behavior Matters: Why some people spend their lives in poverty and social > dysfunction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is a complete misrepresentation:

\- There is no "battle" between SPD and protesters. SPD was trying to quash protests, which resulted in a public backlash. SPD then decided to stop trying to control protesters and left the east precinct. the "autonomous zone" is simply what the protests are calling the new police void.

\- There is no actual evidence of material being thrown at SPD. With all the footage recorded, it would be on video, but all we see is flashbangs and tear gas. The "IED" was a photo of a smashed votive candle, presumably found on the ground.

\- The article seeks to find and name "leaders". There are no leaders, the autonomous zone is just a bunch of people doing stuff, where there is no police presence.

\- There is no sign that Anitfa is involved at all. This is just a boogyman.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey, I live in Seattle and my (not WeWork) coworking space is in the CHAZ. Pretty much all of the press coverage feels like a broadcast from another dimension when I compare it to the place itself: mellow and kind of boring. The only real risk is that some wing of the government will send in uniforms or agitators. If that doesn't happen, I think they'll just do stuff like grow vegetables in Cal Anderson Park. Capitol Hill is usually a pretty fun and mellow place, so if outside forces don't change that it'll just keep on keeping on.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd be very interested to see how long this actually lasts. It's easy to keep what is essentially an ungoverned commune going for a "long music festival" length of time. Let's see how well it works over the course of months/years once tragedy of the commons kicks in and whatever "governing council" emerges suddenly realizes the only way to actually enforce rules on everybody...is with force.

Plus, something like this seems ripe for "mob justice" when someone with contrary opinions decides they'd like to live in the "freedom zone". Wasn't there just a video circulating of a guy being run out of town because they crowd didn't like what he was saying? Who in this utopia decides which opinions are/aren't allowed and how do they enforce that? What happens when an innocent person gets accused of a crime, but since there's no legal system (without the threat of force to back it) the majority decides to take their own justice?

</comment><comment><USER11> Where are all the "antifa" labels coming from? I've not seen any actual evidence that there is any antifa involvement at all.

There's more than one activist group in the USA guys.

<comment><USER7> > Where are all the "antifa" labels coming from?

An organized effort to undermine public support for the Black Lives Matter protests, and to create an enemy to justify over-the-top police actions.

For example: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/nyregion/who-is-martin- gu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/nyregion/who-is-martin-gugino- buffalo-police.html): "The president and his allies have often tried to place anti-fascists and other "outside agitators" at the center of the protests as a way to delegitimize them and to deflect from the fact that the vast majority of the demonstrations have been peaceful."

> I've not seen any actual evidence that there is any antifa involvement at > all.

There isn't any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's just how Seattle rolls. They've done it before, and they'll do it again. More power to them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_General_Strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_General_Strike)

</comment><comment><USER13> Some people associated with it have recently put up their own website: [https://caphillauto.zone/](https://caphillauto.zone/)

You can watch live footage of the zone, read their demands, and see the answers to some FAQs.

There is a lot of purposeful misinformation going around - rumors of food shortages, extortion, and "paramilitary death squads." These aren't true, to say the least.

<comment><USER14> How do you know that the local shops aren't being extorted? You think the shop owners consented to this takeover?

Is it really far-fetched to believe that these shop owners expect violence to their property and possibly their person if they do not participate?

<comment><USER15> > How do you know that the local shops aren't being extorted?

of course it is, like, physically possible that that's happening. There's just no evidence of it happening, so there's no reason to believe it.</comment></comment></comment>


Why don't companies use FreeBSD as much in production as Linux? - <AUTHOR> As die-hard FreeBSD user and admin I'm interested to know why FreeBSD hasn't been used more often (yeah I know about Netflix and Yahoo but still)? <comment><USER3> I'm not sure you're going to find one unifying answer, so I'll just contribute my own experience.

\- FreeBSD lost the desktop battle to Linux. All joking aside about Linux on the desktop, if you want a *nix environment (and not Mac), Linux distributions are just a lot easier to set up and have traditionally enjoyed better packaging of proprietary software (graphics card drivers, RAID card drivers, applications, etc.). While FreeBSD has some very compelling advantages on the server, for those in my circle, it's not not so much better as to justify the cognitive overhead in switching between two similar, but different, OSes.

\- FreeBSD wasn't a first class OS on EC2 for years. This allowed an entire ecosystem of devops tools to evolve with essentially Linux-only support.

<comment><USER4> I actually ran FreeBSD as a "desktop OS" on more than a few IBM Stinkpads for years. It worked well, driver support -- well, wifi was always fun, but if you knew enough, you could get them going (orinoco cards for the win).

That said, I never saw FreeBSD as anything other than a Server OS. So I wouldn't say the "desktop" comparison really ever fit in.

<comment><USER5> My experience with FBSD on the Desktop was always polarizing... when it worked well it was FANTASTIC, way ahead of any linux distro. Great drivers support, no bullshit with audio, 3d graphics worked great, etc. Really good.

If it worked.

If your hardware didn't fit inside a fairly narrow box (e.g. Nvidia for graphics), things failed horribly.

<comment><USER3> It's been a long time since I gave up on FreeBSD on the desktop, but I think back in 2000 I had some bad problems with whatever SoundBlaster card I had (some Audigy thing) and ATi acceleration just wasn't going to happen. But otherwise, it was rock solid. I think from there I went to Gentoo since portage was similar to the ports system.

I did try some of the FreeBSD desktop variants over the years (DragonFly and PC-BSD). But then you're still not quite running FreeBSD. I haven't kept up, but it looks like DragonFly is its own distinct BSD flavor now.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the Audigy cards were always flakey (under Linux, too, as I remember). Support for the Soundblaster-series cards was much better.

The sound was really good for the time if you had a supported card, real hardware mixing, /dev/dsp (or was it /dev/audio) that multiple processes could write to and it was seamlessly mixed. Using the commercial version of OSS, as I recall. In Linux at that time you either had the open source fork of OSS (which wasn't nearly as good), or raw ALSA, which was promising but buggy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to run everything on FreeBSD. It's a great operating system and incredibly stable and I loved every minute of sysadminning a FreeBSD box. Honestly, what changed was Ubuntu. Being able to have a fairly robust server on the cheap and maintain it fairly well with just a few apt-get commands was a huge game changer.

Admittedly I haven't tried running FBSD since 4/5 timeframe and I'm sure quite a bit has changed since then, but I used to spend hours trying to patch and compile upgrades to software. The ports system that they used at the time (and might still use for all I know) was great for installing stuff, but if something didn't exist in ports or was a few version behind, you were compiling and installing from source.

aptitude has 99.99% of everything I've ever needed to install and manage and some of the newer package management systems like npm and the like cover everything else. What used to be hours each week of administration work has become minutes a month. It might be less secure, it might be slightly less robust, but overall I don't even think about systems administration anymore and (to me) that's such a huge savings in time that it's just not worth trying to go back.

And as emersonrsantos mentioned, I can almost guarantee that every hosting provider has Ubuntu in some form or another. If I need to move to a new host, I can have the system set up and be in business in probably less than an hour. What used to take a few full-time sysadmins has now been replaced by a handful of devops guys that not only manage the systems, but also help my engineers automate and improve our development workflow and pipelines. And, as he also mentioned, I can throw a rock and hit a Linux guy. Finding a FreeBSD expert is nearly impossible and they always cost a lot more.

But, it was my first unix and I've got a lot of love in my heart for the BSD way of doing things. (NetBSD and OpenBSD are other fond loves of mine). I ran a hosting company in the early 00s that was powered entirely by OpenBSD off cheap commodity hardware. And NetBSD runs on everything, which is also a pretty cool plus.

These days, I'm content knowing that my kickass Mac desktops owe their existence to the OS I grew up loving.

<comment><USER7> > Honestly, what changed was Ubuntu. Being able to have a fairly robust server > on the cheap and maintain it fairly well with just a few apt-get commands > was a huge game changer.

That hurts to read. Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based) has been around for decades (literally: it's 22 years old), and has been providing an extremely stable server, for free, with just a few apt-get commands.

> What used to be hours each week of administration work has become minutes a > month. It might be less secure, it might be slightly less robust, but > overall I don't even think about systems administration anymore and (to me) > that's such a huge savings in time that it's just not worth trying to go > back.

Or you could switch to Debian and get the same ease-of-use with better security.

If you _really_ wanted security, of course, you'd choose OpenBSD.

<comment><USER8> > Or you could switch to Debian and get the same ease-of-use with better > security.

Honest question: In what ways is the security story on debian better than the security on ubuntu?

<comment><USER9> It's not. I've been using Debian GNU/Linux as my main OS for well over a decade, and I love it both on technical merits, and on the great effort put into it to maintain a user-driven, non-profit, democratic (both in the sense of voting, but even more in the sense of participating) organization.

All that said, I've used Ubuntu on and off since it launched, and they've been a great benefit to both Debian and Linux in general. There were some issues in the start, with not handling cooperating and resource sharing very well, there were a few sore people as a result of that -- but as far as I can tell most of those growing pains are well behind us now.

I personally sneer a bit reflexively when people mention Ubuntu on the server, but frankly that's an issue with me, and not with Ubuntu. I got burned by Ubuntu doing stuff like changing gid/uid numbers for system groups/users and little incompatibilities that made it hard to maintain services across Debian old-stable, stable and a couple of Ubuntu LTS releases _at the same time_ for a while (the typical incompatibilities which generally have plagued Linux for as long as there have been more than one distro).

My impression is that since Ubuntu 12.04 pretty much all the major kinks got worked out, including avoiding issues with LTS -> LTS release upgrades - <USER2> Ubuntu is now as solid an OS as pretty much anything else.

As for the security bit, I _think_ Ubuntu still comes with more out of the box, both on the server and on the desktop than Debian does. Like eg. the ssh daemon, maybe some bonjour networking stuff. Ever since OpenBSD forced everyone to re-examine what "runs by default" I prefer a cleanly installed OS to not listen to neither UDP or TCP _at all_ out of the box. In that sense, Debian might possibly be considered "more secure" \-- but I don't have the impression that there's a big difference in patch rates etc between the two.

Ubuntu/Canonical has gone to great lengths to make Ubuntu for Desktop and Server work out-of-the-box for the great majority of users -- and I honestly think they've done a great job with it. I still prefer Debian, but I also accept that it's a matter of _preference_ not some strict criteria of superiority or the like.

Oh, and I have a special place in my heart for Debian/kFreeBSD even if I've yet to actually get to play with it: [https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD](https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD)

Phew. Apologies for the long post - hopefully it has a few interesting nuggets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Community support. More like community derision from the FreeBSD world.

In the early 2000's, I had to set up a dedicated CVS server for my 10-person startup. I was the dual hat "dev & admin" guy. We were small, but had good desktop machines with good SCSI disks in them (top of the line Seagate, if I remember right).

I set up both a Linux and a FreeBSD dedicated CVS server. We were all happy to try one server for a day, copy the repo to the other one for a day, and try things out.

Well, FreeBSD was a bitch to set up compared to Linux and was easily 10X slower in every way measurable. Like, "cvs up" would take 5 seconds from the Linux server compared to a minute on FreeBSD (yes, same repo...). Hopping on to the FreeBSD box locally showed that every kind of disk activity was way slower than Linux.

I went to the FreeBSD newsgroups and got laughed at. Not a single piece of helpful info. I did get several large words thrown at me about how I didn't understand the benchmarks and the performance shouldn't be noticeable to the end users. At least one guy took to emailing me directly about how I shouldn't be comparing Linux to FreeBSD.

After 2 or 3 days of wrestling, I powered off the FreeBSD box, installed Linux on it, and never considered FreeBSD again.

</comment><comment><USER11> After 18 years of running FreeBSD on my servers, my $0.02:

Politics/marketing:

* Most "unix" admins only know linux and will advocate for it vigorously because it is so much better than.. "what do you use again? Fedora? Ah, FreeBSD, something with F, I knew it!"

* Management not always listens to reason but just wants a discussion go away, so they listen to the loudest advocates.

Knowledge/Community:

* It is easier to copy a solution to a linux problem from stack overflow than to read the FreeBSD handbook, understand the problem and fix it.

* FreeBSD only is fun when one has a higher level of expertise: Knowledge of _sh_ and at least a basic understanding of _make_ are required, being able to at least read _c_ code makes life much easier.

* Reading docs is hard. FreeBSD forces one to understand the standard unix tools that come with it. That means one has to spend some time reading the docs (or at least skimming over them so one knows where to look when the need arises). If one does not understand the tools, even simple init scripts are black magic.

* No exposure to FreeBSD at all: most hosting companies won't even list FreeBSD as an option (though in most you'll find some unix geek who'll happily connect KVM or IPMI and insert the install-CD for you).

* The FreeBSD community is much less forgiving than the linux community: Ask a question that can be answered easily by reading the handbook or some man-page and the response will probably be silence (rarely flaming, just silence).

And finally also some points where one could argue that it makes sense not to use FreeBSD from an economic point of view:

* When using FreeBSD one is regularly forced to clean up linux-BS when venturing outside what /usr/ports provides: #!/bin/bash - or even worse #!/bin/sh that actually wants a bash - is one of the most common problems.

* When compiling software from source that does not come from /usr/ports one regularly has to do research what $leenox-distro-package XY provides because documentation just gives command lines for the most common linux distributions. "Soo.... what exactly does that software need to compile when the docs tell me to _simply apt-get foo-23.5 and bar-42.666_?"

<comment><USER12> > most hosting companies won't even list FreeBSD as an option (though in most > you'll find some unix geek who'll happily connect KVM or IPMI and insert the > install-CD for you).

Some of my datacenter clients use freeBSD for various bits, and I have been that guy. In the end they're migrating away because it's incredibly hard to find experienced engineers. What you describe as "reading docs is hard" can be equated to "my team will be slower for negleglible gain." Dicking around with ports and make is fun, but at the end of the day, we seek lower latency services and faster outage response times.

EDIT: there's also a network effect in puppet / chef / ansible -- More work for your operations team when every community module for managing services doesn't support your platform of choice.

<comment><USER11> TL;DR: You are absolutely right - but that is very, very sad.

> What you describe as "reading docs is hard" can be equated to "my team will > be slower for negleglible gain."

Yes, but only from a very short-sighted point of view. I cannot count the "devops"-meetings I had to attend as a consultant during which I hacked a command line that solved the problem the meeting was supposed to make a plan for and estimate costs... I dare to argue that letting the ops learn the ropes on company time would have been much cheaper than my fees plus costs for working time employees spent on that meeting. But I understand this is very hard to quantify and that in a startup culture people don't want to think beyond the point where the financing is used up.

My fav. test for sysop/devop candidates: "Tell me how large the home directory of all users who use [t]csh as a login shell is on that machine; no, you cannot install anything, there is no perl, ruby or python. You have 90 seconds.". 99% fail. I've even interviewed people who applied for a sysop/devop positions who could not set up a host if not through puppet because they know sh1t about the target OS.

PS: Thanks for being "that guy" who allowed me to use a mature OS. People like you allowed me to have a 336 day uptime as the _lower_ limit. Most of my machines have more than a thousand days of uptime :)

<comment><USER12> This is a attitude classic case of engineers optimizing for the wrong damn thing. Sure, we've all sat in on 18 month projects that should have been a five line shell script. One hopes that whatever expert is teaching ops "the ropes" knows this already. But at least you get a consultant paycheck for their ignorance.

> My fav. test for sysop/devop candidates

But how do you query your LDAP server without installing additional tools? Because in 2016, we have more than one machine. Hundreds. Grepping /etc/passwd is missing the forest for the trees.

You can have all the shell experts, I need people who can write Chef code that passes peer review. kitchen lets us poke around the OS all we want to inspect proper functioning.

> People like you allowed me to have a 336 day uptime as the lower limit. Most > of my machines have more than a thousand days of uptime :)

AFAIK, none of the BSDs have online kernel replacement facilities. So you willingly admit you haven't upgraded your kernels in years? I know fBSD has a reputation, but every once in a while this still happens: [https://threatpost.com/freebsd-patches-kernel-panic- vulnerab...](https://threatpost.com/freebsd-patches-kernel-panic- vulnerability/116001/).

<comment><USER11> > But how do you query your LDAP server without installing additional tools? > Because in 2016, we have more than one machine. Hundreds. Grepping > /etc/passwd is missing the forest for the trees.

You are missing my point, it's about being able to filter and transform textual output. If a sysop can only do what the UI provides s/he is useless when creative solutions are asked for.

> You can have all the shell experts, I need people who can write Chef code > that passes peer review. kitchen lets us poke around the OS all we want to > inspect proper functioning.

Every good sysop I've met can write your Chef code. Understanding system basics and managing with high level tools is not mutually exclusive. Tools like Chef are the result of exactly those sysops automating what they could. You know that saying? "Tomorrow I'll replace you with a shell script." ;)

> So you willingly admit you haven't upgraded your kernels in years?

Yes, I only update when a security problem concerns me and that is pretty rare with custom kernels that only have what is required. Even my desktop setups need a new kernel only once a year or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Simple answer - knowledge share. Many more people know and are familiar with Linux than FreeBSD. Throw in companies like Red Hat, etc. and that makes it more compelling for those wanting some sort of support backing.

Personally, I've been running FreeBSD (including some commercial installs -- years ago) for about 16-17 years.

<comment><USER13> Pretty much this this.

Linux (especially Debian-based distros), is usually the first UNIX flavour that people coming from Windows get in touch with. While FreeBSD has excellent documentation, Ubuntu and others simply have the larger newbie-friendly community.

<comment><USER14> This sums up my experience. I still have an ISO of FreeBSD 10.1 sitting somewhere on my system just waiting for me to copy over to a USB drive once I work out how to set it up on a dual-boot system along with Windows.

So far, all the guides I've seen for dual-booting have been for Linux, and they've all been straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's kind of a virtuous cycle (or vicious cycle, if you prefer BSD): more people use Linux; more guides are written to help others, more software is readily available, and more testing is done by virtue of having a larger user base; so more people use Linux. I don't think there's much to say about qualitative comparisons between Linux and BSD that hasn't already been said to death, but I do think the two are borrowing from each other in healthy ways and approaching parity, at least in an "on paper" sense.

</comment><comment><USER16> These days mostly because of the network effect.

People both get more value from Linux and add more value to it by using it and writing software for it. Take docker or nix for example, huge value for Linux and not so much for systems, where they don't work or aren't first class citizens.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have vendors that require a certain OS. Often, its not even "Linux", its "Red Hat Enterprise version 6.x". If you've ever dealt with an Enterprise Software Vendor, you know the added level of fun of using something other than the strict requirements given. Red Hat is the new Windows for government vendors I've had to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER18> I read / "think" Yahoo is not using FreeBSD any more. The move to Linux started before Marissa era. And I think by now they should be 99% Linux.

Netflix I "think / read" is only using FreeBSD with their Storage Appliance. So that is relatively small parts in number of Servers. Most of their operation, those Chaos Monkey killed machines are all EC2 and Linux.

Whatsapp is Erlang and FreeBSD, a real rare bleed. But i read Facebook is hiring Engineers to make Linux Network Stack better then FreeBSD. Bold claim on the Job Description, then there were rumours Whatsapp moving to integrate with Facebook, i.e moving off FreeBSD to Linux. I doubt thats an coincidence.

Despite the many / some similarities between FreeBSD and OSX, even Apple aren't using any FreeBSD on their Servers. At least there hasn't been any evidence in hiring.

So really, which large, Internet Company is actually using FreeBSD?

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it was a network effect. Around 1992 The free PC-based BSD distributions like 386BSD were at around the same level (if not slightly ahead) of Linux.

However in 1992 and 1993 there were some internal political problems in BSD land (which eventually led to FreeBSD spinning off) and the "USL v. Regents of the University of California" lawsuit also cast a shadow on the legality of the BSDs.

During those two years Linux kept developing, jumped ahead and basically grabbed all the mind-share and marketing share.

The BSDs have been playing catchup since. For instance with fewer developers they had problems supporting a wide range hardware so were not even an option for many.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some reasons I could think:

\- It's easier and cheaper to find Linux sysadmins than BSD ones

\- There's more commercial software supported on Linux

\- There's more companies offering support for Linux

\- Linux is more portable than BSD

\- Linux is one of the standard server OS offered by providers, BSD isn't

<comment><USER21> How is Linux more portable than BSD?! NetBSD has been ported to nearly every platform known to man, even toasters.

I'm surprised that more embedded devices don't run some sort of BSD because they wouldn't have to release code. The PS4's OS is FreeBSD, which they did release a lot of code in return, but they don't have to open source or release all their code (i.e. DRM and other "Security" based stuff) if they don't want to.

<comment><USER22> There's platform, and then there's drivers. There's no point on having an OS on a net-enabled device if that OS can't talk to the network hardware, for example.

Linux has had a ridiculous amount of work from a variety of sources in it's drivers. I once used a git animation tool (forget the name of it, sorry) on the linux kernel source, and the area where the drivers were put was buzzing like a beehive, as people from all sorts of companies were making sure their stuff was supported on linux.

<comment><USER23> >I once used a git animation tool (forget the name of it, sorry)

Probably Gource I would imagine [http://gource.io/](http://gource.io/)

<comment><USER22> That's the one, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everybody for answers!

From what I gather from all these replies people's main concern is that FreeBSD is generally harder to use/configure and management is hard to persuade into supporting it because it would make DevOps less productive.

From the standpoint of a person who run FreeBSD in production on both bare metal and VM's and manages several commercial applications and websites, I must say that plenty (if not all) of these phobias are unjustified. Yes, there are some edge cases but 95% of the time, there's nothing new to learn you already don't know, except new package manager commands and slightly different file system layout.

Not using awesome technologies like ZFS, Boot Environments, Jails, Qjail, Poudriere and awesome PF is just a plain missing out in my opinion.

I personally don't care about desktop, there are already 2 awesome OS's that majority of people use for a reason and that's pretty much enough I think.

I personally heard nothing but praises from people who are long term Linux users/admins who tried it.

Once people figured out couple of OS specifics its all breeze :)

</comment><comment><USER24> In my experience, the BSDs used to be trusted for their reliability and performance. Linux has come a long way in terms of reliability and configuration cost - though performance is harder to tune for. Docker has enabled a lot of trusted deployments. 6-8 years ago I remember the question "Why don't companies use Linux as much in production as FreeBSD?"

Maybe I'm sheltered.

<comment><USER25> I was in devops in a Dotcom in the 1999-2000 era. Back then Linux was still a pretty shaky server OS. In particular the network and NFS stacks were unstable and slow. We originally tried to deploy on Linux but had to switch to FreeBSD to get a stable environment.

But Linux has come a long way since then. The major issues have been resolved and IMO the overwhelmingly larger ecosystem Linux enjoys outweighs most if not all advantages FreeBSD might still have on a technical level.

<comment><USER24> However much I hate the politics surrounding Docker and systemd, they have done a LOT for Linux to provide a standardized way to configure most distros and reliably deploy apps/stacks. I still feel that tuning Linux for networking is not an easy thing to learn about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Personal anecdotes:

About a year ago I wanted to replace newlines in a file with "sed" on FreeBSD. I couldn't.

At first I thought there was an error on my side. I was very surprised to find out that you could not do that at all, it said so right there in "man sed".

Dirty hacks to work around this problem posted on stackoverflow did not work on that machine either.

Tried to mess with newlines with python. Turned out there was some kind of other problem if you open files in 'wb' mode under FreeBSD.

This experience with some of the most basic tools not working as they do on GNU/Linux made me want to avoid FreeBSD if possible.

</comment><comment><USER27> Lowest common denominator.

Those people who are familiar with a Unix variant are more familiar with Linux. Linux is different enough from *BSD that what people do learn about Linux doesn't translate.

Linux entry level is actually easier than Windows these days. In fact when I look for candidates if they only have Ubuntu / Docker on their resume its trash.

What used to be considered entry level skill sets are now called "Michael Jordan" level skillsets ( kernel compile / tuning , C debugging etc etc )

Currently I use Linux because it makes me money. I use the BSD's because I like them

<comment><USER15> > if they only have Ubuntu / Docker on their resume its trash

I hope there's some wiggle room in there for folks who may know more but cater their resumes to what they want to do and/or the buzzwords recruiters are filtering by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can tell you my experience as to why Linux won out in production. Many years ago when I was doing enterprise systems administration, we were using both Linux and BSD equally in the beginning. But what eventually gave Linux the edge was hardware support and package management. Linux had solid SMP support first, which meant we could replace expensive UNIX servers like Suns and AlphaServers with much cheaper Intel based multi-processor servers. PLus Linux had more drivers for hardware like RAID and network cards. We didn't have to hunt down specific, often older, hardware like we did for our BSD servers. Also IBM ported Linux to it's z series servers so Linux had a (what we used to term) "big iron" server solution first and could replace proprietary solutions like the high end HP9000's. Package management was a huge plus. It greatly reduced administrative time. Major software upgrades, like when we had to replace libc6 on all our *NIX servers because of a major security bug, would take hours on the BSD servers but minutes on our Debian servers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Perhaps they have some security concerns. [https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd- defaults.txt](https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.txt) \- more admin time spent tweaking poor default security == more money being spent.

<comment><USER30> Many of the "points" mentioned therein are misleading, at best, if not outright wrong. There was a nice discussion / rebuttal of this article _somewhere_ , although I can't remember where at this moment. Unfortunately, I'm just about to leave but I'll see if I can find it later.

<comment><USER29> Which points are misleading or wrong?

<comment><USER30> Apologies, I just glanced at this link and I think I mistook this article for a "troll" article that has been posted and shared several times. I just looked at this article, started reading through it and it doesn't seem familiar. I don't think I've seen it before. I'm trying to find the "troll" article that I thought this was but I'm not having any luck at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It comes down to the fact that there are more people familiar with linux than BSD. Orders of magnitude more in the US. Unless you're working on something where the GPL is a concern, it's easier to default to linux.

</comment><comment><USER32> Keeping software up-to-date on FreeBSD sucks. That's my one and only complaint. If that got comparably easier, I'd be switching from Ubuntu/Debian on servers back to FreeBSD.

I still run FreeBSD 8.4 on one production system, and recently decommissioned a FreeBSD 5 box that had been happily humming away in a colo for 10 years. I learned FreeBSD before Linux and prefer almost everything else about it...except that part about updating software.

If you take security seriously, you apply security updates in a timely fashion. For a while I was diligent about it on my FreeBSD boxes, monitored vuxml, and updated vulnerable packages regularly with this:

        portaudit -a |
        sed -ne 's/^Affected package: //p' |
        sort -u |
        xargs portupgrade -P -rv

When things go well, and binary packages exist for everything, this is almost as good as `unattended-upgrades` on Debian. But things don't usually go so well. Building packages from source occasionally doesn't bother me. Random breakages in ports and their dependencies bothered me a lot, and became the rule rather than the exception.

Near as I can tell Ubuntu/Debian wins here because it freezes packages alongside the OS release, except for backported security patches if you're on LTS. FreeBSD has only one ports tree. It's in constant flux, and (in my experience) is constantly broken. Why can't ports be branched off alongside the OS release and receive security backports? Maybe FreeBSD doesn't have the manpower to do this, maybe it's cultural, I'm not really sure. What I can say is it's relatively easy to check out, tweak, build and install ports on a case-by-case basis if for some reason you need the latest and greatest of something. I don't see the value in constantly having the latest and greatest of _everything_ though, and it even seems a little antithetical to FreeBSD to me.

Anyway, so port upgrades suck, but base upgrades also suck. Doing an `apt-get dist-upgrade` to go from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 "just worked." Rebuilding world to upgrade from FreeBSD 7.x to 8.x worked, but just barely, and the whole process scared the shit out of me. Random incompatibilities continued to crop up for some time after.

I think this one comes down to the integrated base userland + kernel in FreeBSD versus the "everything's a package" approach in Ubuntu/Debian. Kernel upgrades are much more common on Linux. Not that this is an objectively good thing, but rare events don't tend to get tested and optimized like routine ones do.

Note: if you're a diehard FreeBSD user and you've figured out how to keep your system up-to-date with minimum fuss, please school me.

<comment><USER33> It's a lot easier these days with the new pkg tools.

<comment><USER32> I've used the new pkg tools a little. Can you be more specific? Can they be used to reliably apply unattended security updates now?

<comment><AUTHOR> There days people use freebsd-update to do this. [http://serverfault.com/a/738217/41952](http://serverfault.com/a/738217/41952)

Accompanies with ZFS boot environments there's literally minimal fuss about upgrading and worrying about possible breakages.

<comment><USER32> Thanks, I hadn't seen `freebsd-update install --not-running-from-cron`. I'll give that a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's easier to find Linux admins and it's easier to look up Linux stack traces on SO. "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM," updated for the modern age.

</comment><comment><USER35> Early companies like IBM threw a lot of weight and money behind linux around 2000 or so. From there, Google and other big companies chose Linux as well. This is a large basis of engineering talent and knowledge to build upon.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOtKZA9ri7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOtKZA9ri7M)

</comment><comment><USER36> Java runs on Linux. There are tons of bespoke and third party Java apps running in companies. Running Java on any other x86 UNIX is a hassle.

<comment><USER37> I run several Java applications on a FreeBSD server without problems. Is there a particular subset of Java features that don't work other than on Linux? I also haven't had any issues with Java on macOS.

<comment><USER36> When I put on my pointy corporate IT hat, and I go to the Oracle web site to download Java, I see that Java runs on Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and Windows. Then when I go to download WebSphere, I see that it runs on a similar set plus AIX. Java support for Linux comes from the vendor while Java support for FreeBSD comes from the "community." Corporations will generally not depend on infrastructure that does not have reliable vendors who will sell them support contracts. Linux has this ecosystem in place. FreeBSD does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If they should use BSD, wouldn't OpenBSD actually be better? (Default to security)

<comment><USER17> I use OpenBSD for quite a few services, but end up using FreeBSD for my file servers (OpenZFS). If the progress on multiple CPU usage and virtualization continues on OpenBSD, the only real thing holding me back from getting rid of FreeBSD is the filesystem. I am looking at the progress of HAMMER2 on DragonFlyBSD to see if it is a good fit.

<comment><USER30> Ditto for me. I run OpenBSD for a few specific services (transparent SMTP/spamd proxy, SSH jumpboxes, firewall) but mostly stick with FreeBSD for production primarily because of ZFS.

ZFS really is amazing. Before I ever actually tried it, I couldn't understand why people were so amazed by a filesystem. It's incredibly hard to "go back" and I often feel a bit "crippled" when managing machines not using ZFS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I can't speak for anyone else, but video card support is better in Linux. _shrug_ Otherwise I'd switch to BSD.</comment>


Remains of the Palace of Axayácatl and a house built by Cortés are discovered - <AUTHOR> https://www.inah.gob.mx/boletines/9259-remains-of-the-palace-of-axayacatl-and-a-house-built-by-order-of-cortes-are-discovered-in-monte-de-piedad-building <comment><USER2> Spanish Historian Francisco López de Gómara:

"a few days after Cortes left to confront Narváez, it became time for a festival the Mexicas wanted to celebrate in their traditional way. . . . They begged Pedro de Alvarado to give them his permission, so [the Spaniards] wouldn't think that they planned to kill them. Alvarado consented provided that there were no sacrifices, no people killed, and no one had weapons. More than 600 gentlemen and several lords gathered in the yard of the largest temple; some said there were more than a thousand there. They made a lot of noise with their drums, shells, bugles, and hendidos, which sounded like a loud whistle. Preparing their festival, they were naked, but covered with precious stones, pearls, necklaces, belts, bracelets, many jewels of gold, silver, and mother-of-pearl, wearing very rich feathers on their heads. They performed a dance called the mazeualiztli, which is called that because it is a holiday from work [symbolized by the word for farmer, macehaulli]. . . . They laid mats in the patio of the temple and played drums on them. They danced in circles, holding hands, to the music of the singers, to which they responded. The songs were sacred, and not profane, and were sung to praise the god honored in the festival, to induce him to provide water and grain, health, and victory, or to thank him for healthy children and other things. And those who knew the language and these ceremonial rites said that when the people danced in the temples, they perform very different from those who danced the netoteliztli, in voice, movement of the body, head, arms, and feet, by which they manifested their concepts of good and evil. The Spaniards called this dance, an areito, a word they brought from the islands of Cuba and Santo Domingo. While the Mexica gentlemen were dancing in the temple yard of Vitcilopuchtli [Huitzilopochtli], Pedro de Alvarado went there. Whether on [the basis of] his own opinion or in an agreement decided by everyone, I don't know, but some say he had been warned that the Indian nobles of the city had assembled to plot the mutiny and the rebellion, which they later carried out; others, believe that [the Spaniards] went to watch them perform this famous and praised dance, and seeing how rich they were and wanting the gold the Indians were wearing, he [Alvarado] covered each of the entrances with ten or twelve Spaniards and went inside with more than fifty [Spaniards], and without remorse and lacking any Christian piety, they brutally stabbed and killed the Indians, and took what they were wearing."</comment>


A B2B software marketplace instead of sales email drip campaigns back and forth - <AUTHOR> https://joshuaschoenaker.com/a-b2b-software-marketplace-instead-of-sales-email-drip-campaigns-back-and-forth/ <comment><USER2> Is the article supposed to end on a cliffhanger like this?

The better way of course is to do this via inbound marketing and discovery. For example, you make a youtube search for "how do I make my laptop faster under Linux", and then you watch some free videos and maybe even contact some companies to buy their stuff.

The hypothesis behind cold calling and cold emailing is that 90% of customers don't do this for some reason, and are just waiting for some random person to contact them about something new for them to try :)</comment>


No, Humans Will Never Achieve Interstellar Travel - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2016/07/no-humans-will-never-achieve-interstellar-travel/ <comment><USER2> Misleading beyond measure. I expected a convincing argument, but found a petty labeling game.

And to call yourself overly pessimistic seems only to call for attention.

</comment><comment><USER3> Misleading title. The author concedes that interstellar travel may be possible, but that we will have evolved beyond recognition by that time. A fair point, but a bit sensationalized.</comment>


The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> If Russian hacking is really the threat that it has been made out to be in the last few weeks, the question the media should be asking is: why did the U.S. Government do so little to counter it for so many years?

Oh, wait, that would potentially point the finger in the wrong direction. The narrative is supposed to be "illegitimate president", right?

</comment><comment><USER3> Man, is the Times trying their hardest to grind that axe...</comment>


Ask HN: End projects with revenue b/c it wasn't enough to quit your day job? - <AUTHOR>

How many people out there have abandoned projects that were generating revenue / cash because they were never going to be big enough?
How much revenue / cash were they generating? (I say revenue / cash because I'm not counting businesses that had revenue but tons of expenses and never gave anything back)
Did you get anything for them, or just let them wind down? <comment><USER2> I had a few ad and affiliate sites that made a fair amount of money at their peak, and then died after Google algorithm changes. TechSpyer.com was just a WordPress site that took an XML feed from Commission Junction and Linkshare and created posts with affiliate links for consumer electronics products. It took about an hour to make (it used a free WordPress theme and a custom XML to post plugin that I wrote). It made about $150 per month back in 2007 before I sold it for $1500 on Flippa. I later made a similar site for general products called DealSpyer.com that made about $100/month before traffic dried up. I had a travel site called RewardFreak.com that had pages for all the travel loyalty programs, and affiliate links to travel portals to book flights, hotels, cars, sign up for a rewards credit card, etc. There were thousands of pages of content, but 99% of the traffic came from 5 pages (for lesser known frequent flyer programs, I ranked higher than the actual websites). Just 1 or 2 affiliate sale per month was enough for $200+ revenue.

In total, I averaged about $500 a month during 2007-2010 with costs under $20/month, but 2011 the traffic on these sites disappeared overnight with the Panda update, so I just let the domains expire.

</comment><comment> alok-g While I am not in this boat, you should end the project if the returns from it (projected into the future if needed) are not more than whatever else you could gain with the time and money you are putting into this project, plus the stress you are dealing with, if any. Comparison to day job is not valid at least directly.

For example, if you are putting in T hours of time per day and M amount of money, think about what is the realistic value you could reap from that time and money, taking everything into account. Whatever is expected to give higher returns for your efforts, resources and stress, should be what you do.

Apologies if I stated something that you find obvious.

<comment><AUTHOR> No I understand and certainly agree with what you were saying. My question was more when you've come to this realization that the site making you $500 / month is not going to go much further and not worth your time, what are people doing with these side projects? Try to sell them, leave them alone and reap whatever cash happens to come in, or other solutions?</comment></comment>


Why Woz Worries Microsoft Is Now More Innovative Than Apple - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/14/keen-on-steve-wozniak-why-woz-worries-microsoft-is-now-more-innovative-than-apple-tctv/

<comment><USER2> While it's true that the New Windows 8 UI is likely a greater departure from the design of previous consumer desktop OS interfaces than is iOS (for better or worse), it remains saddled with Desktop Compatibility mode, user-exposed filesystem and mouse-and-keyboard-oriented UI elements. iOS was a clean break, while Windows 8 is a more conservative hybrid approach.

</comment><comment><USER3> When your history is as impressive as Microsoft's, being forced to take risks may well encourage innovation, however it would be nice if that article gave reasons why Woz thinks what he does.</comment>


HN'er DanielBMarkham creates blog capturing summaries of libertarian news items - <AUTHOR> http://freedom-or-safety.com/blog/

<comment><AUTHOR> The purpose of this is to capture a quick (2-4 paragraph) summary of a current news or opinion piece of interest to libertarians. I keep seeing more and more pieces of interest to us, and so many of them are so exaggerated that you have to wade through 500 words of text to get to about 2 sentences of substance. By summarizing, busy people can get the gist of what's going on without wasting their time. I also have a convenient place for a history of everything that's happening. I feel like this is all heading somewhere.

For those of you interested in this sort of thing, hope you like it!

(Where possible, sources are indicated in the title. Links are provided back to the original articles for those with more time on their hands.)</comment>


Show HN: Morph – Integrate Services Without Coding - <AUTHOR> http://morph.apirise.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey its George one of the founders here. Our goal with Morph is to enable data transformation between WebHooks with no need to write code. Instead, you may use our visual configuration editor. Our purpose is to make simpler to connect arbitrary services together.

Specifically, with the editor you may: \- Rename fields from the original response \- Move them to a different place in the response \- Remove them completely \- Create new fields and structures

We plan to add more functionalities in the futre. So if you have any questions or comments I'd love to answer them.

</comment><comment><USER2> I use hubot and slack(or idobata), what Morph does. Visual editor and live change is useful, especially trial and error phase!

<comment><USER3> hey thanks for your comment. you could consider using morph to test the integration between hubot and other services?</comment></comment>


Namecheap's new design - <AUTHOR> https://www.namecheap.com/

<comment><USER2> bam! it's cool. I signed in only yesterday, and there was no sign of new design it's a pleasant surprise. ;)

Update: I spoke too early, upon signing into my account and my domain section is old. it's looking creepy, 2014 design and 1992 one inside it :/</comment>


Kilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antirez/kilo <comment><USER2> I hope the author gives people the option of turning off syntax highlighting or to set a no colors option. Sometimes I find Vim annoying because it doesn't have a command line option for this; like Emacs does.

<comment><USER3> Vim does:

       vim file -c ':syntax off'

<comment><USER2> I'll have to give that a try when I get home. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Does not depend on libcurses, directly emits VT100 escapes on the terminal."</comment>


The Print Shop: Why the Dot-Matrix Printer Icon Faded from View - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-print-shop-why-the-dot-matrix-printer-icon-faded-from-view <comment><USER2> > Considering what came after—specifically, Linux, and the philosophy it > inspired—did we dodge a bullet in this case?

No. Rather, I believe those questions were for the most part resolved with UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. v. Berkeley Software Design, Inc and Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp.

Phoenix Technologies showed that cleanroom reimplementation was beyond the reach of even IBM's lawyers. (Echos are still with us, as in Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc.)

Plus, "and the philosophy it inspired"? Which philosophy is that? Stallman's "free software"? If so, then I'll point to this quote:

> It also potentially could have threatened the creation of open-source > software that came after the 1987 court decision, by implying that > individual screens could be copyrighted.

The GNU Manifesto was in March 1985, so precedes the case.

This article also implies that free (or at least open source) software is not innovative, and primarily copies from non-free UIs.</comment>


Twitter announces Site Streams beta - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/10592ec9038be810?hl=en

<comment><USER2> I guess the fact that Twitter employees use bit.ly to map from short url:s to slightly longer url:s even in mails means something, but I'm not sure what.

(the <http://bit.ly/sitestreams_doc> link goes to <http://dev.twitter.com/pages/site_streams>)

<comment><AUTHOR> I assume they just do it to track clicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hm.. has any one hacked up some fancy visualizations using their framework yet?</comment>


Gimp open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/28/gimp_open_source_image_editor_forked_to_fix_problematic_name/ <comment><USER2> As an occasional user, i have to say 'GIMP' is the _perfect_ name.

Take it out of the box, struggle to make it do the thing but manage eventually, and once satisfied put it down with a sense of revulsion and yet pride at having made it perform.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it legit to sell HN account with high karma points? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> As a heuristic, if you have to ask whether or not it is legit, the answer is probably no.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you may want to define "legitimate" in this context. Obviously your karma isn't that of another person, and particularly not someone who wants to buy an HN account.

</comment><comment><USER4> Try to reason from first principles: karma is a property of a HN username. A username is attached to a human identity, even if not enforced.

Karma is used to predict future quality of that human's posts based on previous posts, and for it to make any sense it must be assumed that past quality is a predictor of future quality.

Changing the human behind the karma breaks those assumptions, so it is a way of misleading the site's users.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only "legit" reason I can think of that would make someone say, "I'll pay you for that user account" is that they are a spammer who wants to be able to submit links that get around the various automatic account controls in place (that prohibit accounts below a certain karma threshold from creating posts or commenting too frequently).

</comment><comment><USER6> On HN, karma is a commodity. You've put the time and effort into growing your karma legitimately and if you don't have a problem - why would anyone else.

Think about it, how do we know this isn't the person who bough it having doubts about the purchase?

</comment><comment><USER7> Seems like bad karma to me.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would someone want to buy it?

<comment> mkr-hn Some people care about accumulations represented by numbers. I don't understand it either.

<comment><USER8> I would even imagine most really high-karma accounts have probably already been linked to a known real-world identity. There isn't a pm system or any private content in user accounts so even nefariously selling access to someone else's account isn't likely to be of value to anyone.

Although I guess that depends on what you would consider 'high' karma. If it's just anything above the threshold for downvoting then maybe having a force multiplier for that might be worth something to somebody. Still though, I wouldn't pay _money_ for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bet if you dig in Silk Road you can find someone selling it.

</comment><comment><USER10> What about robbing a bank?</comment>


Is It Possible to Build an "Unsinkable" Ship? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=unsinkable-titanic-engineering

<comment><USER2> Of course you can build an unsinkable ship, as a matter of fact for some uses it's mandated by law.

If you build in fibreglass you will usually make a sandwich construction with fibreglass on either side and a layer of stiff foam in the middle. This construction technique is widely used because you can make strong and light boats with it. If you place enough foam in the lower part of the boat (enough to displace the weight of the ship) you have an unsinkable ship. Even if it breaks apart the pieces will still float.

I've seen small boats of this design in the harbour where I live that have been left unattended for years, and they don't sink, even when they're full of water.

The question is whether you can build a _large_ and _commercially viable_ ship that's unsinkable. For larger vessels it's usually not an option to have the lower decks filled with foam, since it detracts substantially from the cargo or passenger carrying ability.

<comment><USER3> I clicked to post exactly this. I live on the Chesapeake Bay, and it seems like half the boats in the local Craigslist are of the unsinkable variety.

I think what the article is really getting at is whether or not it's possible to build an indestructible ship, and of course, the answer to that is no.

It's possible to make a ship that is much stronger than the people it carries -- most ships are, but that doesn't make the people any less fragile or more susceptible to death, injury or drowning.

Submarines are perhaps a superior design for this, on paper, but generally speaking, a submarine isn't where you want to be if the submarine is in any danger whatsoever.

So yeah, unsinkable boat? Check. Unsinkable passengers? No check.

<comment><USER4> Unsinkable passengers? Sure. Just make everybody wear drysuits and floaties. It may not be Titanic chic, but you can't have everything.

<comment><USER5> If you get caught under deck while the unsinkable ship is flooding with water and possibly going belly-up, that might not help you much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see why it would be impossible to make an unsinkable ship. Just make it out of material that's less dense than water.

<comment><USER7> Less dense than water and strong enough to withstand choppy seas, storms, pirates, accidents ...

It might not sink, but if it won't hold together, you can't keep people and stuff inside it. Of course, I'm not a materials expert, but this seems like a good reason our ships are made of metal.

<comment><USER8> There are many materials that are stronger than steel and lighter than water.

It's all about costs, not about technology.

<comment><USER9> Such as?

And stronger by weight or by volume? Stronger in tensile strength or by compression? In resisting flexing? Can it handle vibration and bending without cracking? Is it tough enough not to be abraded? Can it distribute stress (by giving a bit)?

The word "stronger" by itself has no meaning in engineering. You need to specify all those things I listed when describing stronger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a minor quibble with this article. We have a pretty good reason why they didn't either extend the watertight compartments or use a double hull in the construction.

Extending the watertight compartments up into the ship makes passenger movement much harder; a killer for a ship built around luxury.

The double hull would have added a lot of weight to the ship. Titanic's sister ship Britannic required a bigger engine to maintain the same speed and was less economical as a result. Titanic was expected to perform weekly Atlantic crossing over a very long lifetime and the cost would have been substantial.

<comment><USER11> Baseline for me is, the Titanic was built in 1912 to the standards they had back then (afaik even the insufficient number of live boats was accepted then), SOLAS was aresult of that disaster.

Imagine the Costa Concordia would have been lost not at shore but at high sea, the same result.

What happened in both cases, or is currently happening, is a review design and operating guidelines, which is good. And double-hules are still not common place, even today.

And yes, after all it has been, is and will most likely be for quite a long time about the trade off between safety and profitability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> These guys tout an unsinkable sailboat. Boat inside a boat with foam in between. Apparently you can punch a big hole in it, flood the inner compartment and it will still be able to sail. I suppose if you snap off the keel then it could go upside down, which isn't very good to you even if it floated. So really "unsinkable" means more than the ability to float.

<http://www.etapyachting.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't a better question: Is it possible to build a ship that ensures passenger survival even if the boat is partially destroyed?

<comment><USER5> My best idea is to build your ship out of a dozen smaller ships and then tie them together.

<comment><USER9> Be careful they don't drag each other down if a number of them sink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Whaler#Unsinkability>

<comment><USER15> Boat != Ship

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Titanic wasn't the largest ship ever built. It had a sister ship that was built earlier and of the same size. About two weeks after Titanic was built, an even larger ship was constructed.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wouldn't it be cheaper to focus on emergency failsafe devices or similar safety solutions to those incorporated by modern aircraft?

Examples include:

-Self-righting mechanisms

-Self-sealing compartmental design

-Re-floating devices

-"Carefree" fly-by-wire preventing dangerous manoeuvering

<comment><USER15> All of these already exist in some form:

> Self-righting mechanisms

Modern ships can easily transfer ballast fluids (typically sea water, but sometimes fuel or distilate water) to correct any listing. There are no methods of righting an overturned ship because that would require an astronomical amount of moment.

> Self-sealing compartmental design

Watertight doors can be controlled from multiple stations on the ship, such as the bridge or the engineering control room.

> Re-floating devices

If you mean safety devices: Ships carry liferafts that, in the event of sinking, automatically detach from the ship, float to the surface, and inflate. If you mean re-floating the entire ship: Not feasible to re-float something that weighs hundreds of thousands of tons just to save some scrap steel.

> "Carefree" fly-by-wire preventing dangerous manoeuvering

Ships have automatic navigation and piloting, though not in shallower waters such as in ports.

<comment><USER17> I'm not reinventing the wheel here, or suggesting anything new - just that focusing on _improving_ these would be a better investment of resources than creating an unsinkable ship.

For example:

* How good are the systems that realise that ships need righting and transfer the ballast automatically before it overturns?

* Refloating may not be feasible once the ship is overturned, but by then it'll be too late. How about self-inflating bags that inflate as the ship _starts_ to sink, buying valuable time for people to escape?

* Automatic navigation is one thing, but how can we improve it? Does it identify foreign objects above/below the waterline? Does it have stabilisation assistance? Does it pump ballast around to ensure the best possible handling under any condition?

Just because these things already exist doesn't mean they can't be improved. In some cases this could potentially be done relatively cheaply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sure it's possible, but is it economical?

Every person is only willing to pay so much for a ticket, you could make ships that couldn't be sunk but it would cost so much that it wouldn't be worth it.

Instead of making unsinkable ships, we put lifeboats on sinkable ships.

<comment> excuse-me Exactly - these are pretty unsinkable, but not very comfortable for a cruise - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamar_class_lifeboat>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> tldr: "The short answer is no."

<comment><USER20> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe, but probably not a ship that carries 1000 passengers, 1 million barrels of oil, fish, bring iPads from China or whatever ships are generally built for. So the answer for the real world is probably not.</comment>


Ask HN: What's Paul Graham's opinion of Clojure? - <AUTHOR>

Paul Graham is one of the biggest advocates of using LISP for web development, and Clojure seems to be the most popular LISP for web development.  In fact, since it emphasizes immutable data structures and parallelization, it's even supported by Heroku and will probably get more and more adopters.
I know Paul Graham believes Arc is or will ultimately be the most expressive LISP for web development, but he still writes about Scheme and Common Lisp.  I cannot find anything on Google where he discusses his views on Clojure.
So what are they? <comment><USER2> pg on an Arc FAQ: Why not build Arc on top of Java/Parrot/.NET?

We're trying to make something for the long term in Arc, something that will be useful to people in, say, 100 years. (If that sounds crazy, remember that we're already up to 50.) So (a) we're not in a hurry to save effort; when you're trying to make something that will last 100 years, there is plenty of time to work on it, and (b) we don't want to adhere to anything that isn't timeless, lest the whole project curl up like a bimetallic strip. (<http://paulgraham.com/arcfaq.html>)

If I read it correctly, according to pg JVM isn't timeless, and Clojure is at risk of curling up like a bimetallic strip. :) (For the record, I believe Rich Hickey is a genius and his recently released Datomic is ground-breaking. Clojure is pretty good too, but just a trite top heavy with Java/JVM.)

<comment><AUTHOR> But the JVM is just Clojure's underlying implementation. Or technically one of two. That can change in the future. I believe Arc's underlying implementation is pre-Racket PLT Scheme, which is already out of date, but that doesn't mean Arc itself can't exist in 100 years.

I think Clojure's reliance on the JVM was more to facilitate its initial adoption (release early and often rather than once you've written and tested thousands of libraries) rather than a permanent language feature. So assuming pg agrees that Clojure is unlikely to curl up like a bimetallic strip even if and when the JVM loses popularity, I wonder what his view on using it at the present is.

<comment><USER2> "But the JVM is just Clojure's underlying implementation. Or technically one of two."

Yes, the CLR is the other half. Hmm, just trying to reassess this myself: While playing with Clojure, I found I had to use the Java libraries for basic stuff like file i/o (at least that is what all the examples pointed me to). I'd have been much happier playing with native Clojure libraries for things like that as I found the syntax became really unLisp like. I'm hoping I missed something, and that there are in fact ways to avoid the Java libraries when you want to. In which case I'd agree that "JVM is _just_ Clojure's underlying implementation" and might in fact take another stab at Clojure.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm new to Clojure as well, so I don't know if there's a native way to perform normal I/O. The cleverly named article at <http://copperthoughts.com/p/clojure-io-p1> is over a year old, so I don't know if things have changed, but it suggests that besides the slurp function (which appears as impractical from a memory standpoint as the Perl equivalent), you really do need to dip into Java for I/O.

Assuming it's just a matter of time before I/O and all other common tasks in Clojure are done in native Clojure, it really seems like a contender for the pg "hundred year language." It has lots of default macro shortcuts for common tasks and really seems to prefer abstracting away redundancy to following tradition. It even uses the Arc-style let macro instead of the paren-happy one found in Scheme and CL. It also makes concurrency almost as simple as pg's "Bring Back Moore's Law" startup idea. And it's also well suited to web applications. The more I think about, the more it really does seem to be the Arc that's already here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists find a spot where no life can survive - <AUTHOR> https://www.livescience.com/life-not-found-most-extreme-pools-dallol-ethiopia.html <comment><USER2> So they found my ex's address?</comment>


How to write a good job description - <AUTHOR> http://folyo.me/guides/how_to_write_a_good_job_description

<comment><USER2> An enjoyable read, with good food for thought.

One disagreement:

"We're pretty nice guys to work with, as long as you love cats like us of course (dog people need not apply, sorry!)."

Having "need not apply" in a job description can be off-putting. You might be in violation of the ADA (Americans with Dogs Act), and you unnecessarily antagonize people with dogs and people without dogs.</comment>


Female Hackers Still Face Harassment at Conferences - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/female-hackers-still-face-harassment-at-conferences <comment><USER2> Article seems like a stretch. People call into my office where 3 people work, 2 designers and me -- I do software development and webwork. People ask me if I can do print work and layouts, nope.

Another time a lady giving a talk I was Liaising, and she booked the conference room, assumed I could setup all her perhiperals for her to the lecturn just because I'm a geek I guess. I said Nope every campus rooms technology is different -- you figure it out or call local support staff here; ohhhhh.

(Bad) Assumptions are made by all genders, but we need not blow them up into seemingly massive issues.</comment>


Kindle Publishing Unleashed book free today 1/26 - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Publishing-Unleashed-ebook/dp/B00B1YQNG4/

<comment><AUTHOR> Lot of useful information in this one about publishing a book for kindle.. I wonder how many of us here at hn have self published something this way?</comment>


Hereditas: Open in Case of Death or Disappearance - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ItalyPaleAle/hereditas <comment><AUTHOR> For a more thorough explanation, here's another link: [https://tinyurl.com/digitalblackbox](https://tinyurl.com/digitalblackbox)

The author of the software notes in the description that he is looking for help in the security/cryptography field. I really think he's got something special there, so I wanted to bring it to everyone's attention. I have no affiliation whatsoever, this simply popped up on my "recommended" area on Github.</comment>


How Would You Treat a Million Dollar Race Horse? - <AUTHOR> http://bennesvig.com/how-would-you-treat-a-million-dollar-race-horse/

<comment><USER2> Whats funny is that without professional intervention, most people would find themselves with a dead horse in a few weeks. Million dollar or not.

How would I treat a million dollar race horse? I don't know, feed it hay?</comment>